


Where Love Hides

by gyuhan



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Royalty, Knight Kim Mingyu, M/M, Pining, Prince Yoon Jeonghan, if you like having secret little rendezvous...
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:41:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27273592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gyuhan/pseuds/gyuhan
Summary: A prince baits a knight into giving chase.“I always know you’ll find me when I disappear,” the Prince says.“It’s not as though you don’t tell me you’re running away, Your Highness.”Between his fingers, Mingyu unfolds the letter he carefully tucked into one of the pouches on his belts and holds it up for Prince Jeonghan to see. Evidence of their scheduled meeting at the Prince’s instruction. He has several others just like it from the Prince. He tucks the letter back away.
Relationships: Kim Mingyu/Yoon Jeonghan
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	Where Love Hides

**Author's Note:**

> helloooooooo. i'm going to start posting a lot of my unfinished wips in the next few days because i'm worried that i'll never complete them if they're left to sit any longer in my google docs collecting dust. (maybe external validation via comments and kudos will help me finish them or something? idk.) i started writing this fic in january, which is around the time my obsession with royalty aus hit its peak. this isn't the big bad royalty au i've been writing, just a short fic i thought up after a dream. yes, i'm the type of writer who gets ideas from dreams. stephenie meyer i'm coming for your brand.
> 
> the next fic should be a cute high school au with soft jeonghan and light teen angst. just gotta figure out where to cut it off first.

“Your Highness,” Mingyu says in the tired tones of a knight who has his hands more than full, “you know you can’t keep running off like this.”

“Can’t?” the man in question challenges from where he stands in royal leisure garments upon the shores of an eastern sea. His golden laced breeches are torn halfway up the outer thigh from a branch-snared thread, his shins raised and reddened from the fast-creeping emergence of a flora rash, ankles streaked with mud. “Is it not more accurate to say that I _shouldn’t_ , since none other than you would be as knowledgeable in just how well I _can_ keep running off?”

“Yes, you are exceptionally skilled at it,” Mingyu relents, his hand releasing the white-knuckled grip he had kept on the hilt of his sword while stalking through the brush, following with a competent knight’s ease after the tracks the Prince had given no thought to conceal. “And you are also exceptionally good at ignoring my warnings not to.”

Prince Jeonghan turns now away from the foam sloshing up to clean his bare feet—and just where have his boots gone?—to meet Mingyu’s eyes. His expression opens, cheeks high as the thin, polite smile he employs for the court broadens in a rather improper manor to expose teeth and gums, becoming himself once again outside the walls of the palace, his face rosy from the thrill of the chase. He swings his arms out and then threads his fingers together in front of himself, rocking on his heels and catching the sunlight across the bridge of his nose, the flat of his chin, the unmarked neck of a prince confined to sunlight only through greenhouse glass.

Mingyu wishes then more than ever that he had even half of the Prince’s cunning so that he could trick time itself into suspending and hanging there, in that moment of Prince Jeonghan’s true self shining through the bars of his princely title, long enough for him to catch his breath before Jeonghan asks him to engage in any sort of intelligent conversation.

“Surely you don’t fault me for this, sir? Don’t you find the hunt to be exciting?”

“The hunt?” Mingyu repeats suspiciously, the word reminding him of the inherent danger inflicted on a prince at birth. He casts his eyes around, stepping closer to where the Prince stands unguarded on the open shores, the land flat and pulse-thumpingly exposed from one corner to the next.

He had made sure to disturb the Prince’s tracks as he traced them from the palace out toward the sea, but there was no guarantee that others hadn’t found him first in the time it took Mingyu to realize that the Prince had once again left a rendezvous letter hidden within his armaments. Had Mingyu finished up his bath late or chosen to eschew his sword training for the morning, there would be no telling what could have happened to the Prince. For a man of royalty, tied directly to the throne, he was too reckless. And yet Mingyu had followed him without calling the guard to fan out more knights in a search party. He never did.

“I always know you’ll find me when I disappear,” the Prince says.

“It’s not as though you don’t tell me you’re running away, Your Highness.”

Between his fingers, Mingyu unfolds the letter he carefully tucked into one of the pouches on his belts and holds it up for Prince Jeonghan to see. Evidence of their scheduled meeting at the Prince’s instruction. He has several others just like it from the Prince. He tucks the letter back away.

The Prince steps nearer, white sand clinging to his toes and the soles of his feet. Mingyu nearly takes a step back out of dizziness despite how he’s tried training himself not to react like so around the Prince.

“Did you not like the clues I left behind for you?” His Highness’s brow raises, smile thin now but in something like a tease, still not playing his role. He touches the highest point on the rip in his breeches with a delicate hand, his nails filed short and clean, pinches it, then lifts it enough to draw Mingyu’s gaze down toward it. He spreads his index and middle finger inside to push apart the cloth, exposing a sliver of soft thigh—if anyone else were to witness this they’d have Mingyu’s eyes out for drinking in the sight. “I even ripped my breeches for you.”

Mingyu shakes his head, looking away toward the untamed wood and undergrowth that the Prince ran through all in a game. He touches the hilt of his sword again, just once, a fleeting habit to regain some composure. He waits for his cheeks to cool.

“You shouldn’t rip your garments for another, Your Highness.”

“I do a lot of things that a prince shouldn’t,” Prince Jeonghan reminds him flippantly with a loose roll of his wrist. “Like befriend the servants, or run off without the King’s approval, or look over the gardens at handsome knights when they train with boys who can’t keep up.”

Mingyu holds his chin up and steers clear of the bait dropped at the end of the Prince’s sentence. “I don’t mean as a prince; I don’t concern myself with other princes. I’m speaking only to you.”

“And you think yourself justified in telling me what I should or shouldn’t do?” Jeonghan says, his voice just breathless enough to catch. “If you upset me and I were to strip you of your knighthood, would you still try to stop me from doing whatever I want?”

Mingyu’s mouth twitches, trying to repress a smile. There’s a patient humor in his voice when he reminds the Prince that: “Your Highness, your father appointed me. You could do nothing to send me away. Only a king has that right.”

“And when I’m the king? What then, when you’re mine?”

Their eyes lock. _You’re mine_.

Mingyu’s pulse thumps in his throat as fast as the foot of a hunted rabbit, the chords there tightening. He should say something quick, something to preserve himself, but his mind melts like candle wax against the presence of Prince Jeonghan’s searing eyes on him.

“Well,” Mingyu starts, then stops. He licks over his wind-chapped lips. The air on the shore dries out everything, he placates himself, as his mouth dries under the Prince’s watch. The scent of sea salt and kelp layers itself over his lungs like papier-mâché, unable to smell anything else as he tries to breathe as deeply as he can. “I suppose when that happens I won’t be playing cat and mouse with you anymore. After all, how could I stop a king from strolling his lands? I’d have no right.”

The Prince looks past Mingyu and toward the swaying woods, then around the shoreline. “The lands are still mine now,” His Highness claims, gesturing with his hands upturned and spreading wide around him, trying to encapsulate the very ground they both stand on now. “They're waiting for me.”

Mingyu’s jaw ticks at the proprietary nature of Jeonghan’s tone. He wouldn’t call the Prince spoiled, but he just as certainly wouldn’t call the Prince generous with his things. Mingyu supposes it’s just the nature of royalty to be as such, to view even land as a rightful possession. The crassness of such a notion isn’t lost on him.

“Yes,” he agrees slowly, “but you still belong to the King until your coronation.”

The Prince whirls around on his heel with agile elegance, winds whipping the pale hair from over his eyes and away from the damp moue of his lips as he meets Mingyu’s gaze. His face is thunderous, but struggling not to show it.

Mingyu’s mouth twitches and he asks flatly, “Are you upset to hear so? Are you so bothered by the truth?”

His Highness holds his eyes for a long, shameful moment, his hair tangling in an even stronger gust of wind. A man at the peak of something harrowing, standing off against Aeolus with his feet achingly bare, his chest cored to expose the dripping chasm of his heart.

“I don’t want to belong to anyone.”

There’s heat in Prince Jeonghan’s voice. Mingyu can’t ignore the way it makes his throat tingle, his hands curling into themselves.

He releases a short, startled laugh. Somewhat mocking, somewhat awed. A mix between two vastly different emotions; it inspires the same breed of confusion as a lot of things that involve the Prince do for him. It would be ages before he could unravel these feelings.

“And yet you will one day have ownership over an entire kingdom and its people,” he points out in the tone of someone facing the inevitable, will lead the Prince backward into it if he has to.

His Highness shakes his head and turns his face away. Roughly, Jeonghan says, “I don’t want a kingdom’s people.”

Jeonghan doesn’t often talk about what he wants with Mingyu. There’s no point to it, really. A knight can’t do anything for a prince. He can be a shield, sure, but he can’t afford the treasures a prince would desire, can’t take him far away, can’t keep him close. He lays everything he has to claim before whatever deity controls these things and finds himself wanting, his prospects barren, his hands toward the sky and offering no more than air.

He asks anyway.

“What do you want, then, Your Highness?”

“I want you.”

Stunned silence. Impossible, and yet. Mingyu’s throat closes up and he grasps quickly at the hilt of his sword before the world tilts. Inside him, something greedy gorges itself on those three words. Desire turns his stomach entropic, builds palisades around itself, throttles him until it’s painted with gore.

“You,” Jeonghan says, “and this ocean.”

Mingyu takes a shallow breath. _Me and the ocean._ He has to rationalize this. He has to refit it back into the realm of possibility.

There’s no inflection in his voice as he parrots, “The ocean? So Your Highness doesn’t want to lead a nation, but you want to control the seas and keep a knight in your entourage for protection?” That’s what he has to mean. Mingyu can’t stomach anything else. “The court would be thrown into hysterics if they knew you wanted to be one of the pirates your father is trying to rid the kingdom of.” He says this like it’s a joke.

The Prince frowns.

“You know I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I’m not allowed to know.”

“Mingyu—”

“Your Highness,” Mingyu nearly shouts, a bizarre expression overtaking his face, swallowing back acid, “I’m only a knight. I belong to the King.”

Prince Jeonghan furrows his brow and shakes his head, a small, thoughtless gesture. He’s growing increasingly outraged and isn’t even attempting to hide it, taking a step closer before a rift can fully rupture between them.

“Yes, I know, but you don’t underst—”

“You can’t do this.”

“ _I can’t_?” Jeonghan’s mouth hangs open wide, and there’s anger there in the look he gives Mingyu. Mingyu can see it clear as day. He can hear the spiteful voice the Prince takes with him, feels it wound him. “We’ve already established that you cannot make or tell me to do anything. How much longer do you think it will be before my coronation exactly? Hm? With my father as tired from the throne as he is?”

“You shouldn’t talk that way about the King, your father, I mean—”

“Shouldn’t I? When being king is the only thing that’s holding me back from taking what I want?” His voice gets quieter now, slower, realizing. “From what’s right here in front of me…”

Their eyes meet. It’s nothing new, the way they look at each other. Frequently they find themselves like this, having these indescribable exchanges with only their eyes. They can say so much without speaking one word to each other.

Right now, Jeonghan wants to take him. In the biblical sense, perhaps, or maybe just in the way a prince wants everything: in its rawest, easiest to swallow form, with the painlessness of inheritance. It’s that kind of ownership. It has to be only that. It shouldn’t be anything else.

Mingyu has known Prince Jeonghan for what feels like his whole life. In all their years of knowing each other, the Prince has never lost the magnetism he embodies that Mingyu reveres—almost excessively so, to the point where he lets it get to him at times when Jeonghan’s at his most persuasive. The Prince is always persuasive when there’s something he can gain from it; he likes to play games, and he likes to win them, if only to bask in the glow of prideful gloating.

Mingyu doesn’t like the way the Prince’s eyes drink him in. He doesn’t like the step, then the other, that Jeonghan takes to bring himself closer. Or so Mingyu tells himself.

“Make a bet with me,” Prince Jeonghan says, voice low like they’re conspiring together.

Really, just the act of them alone like this, standing close enough to embrace, with His Highness’s trousers torn and all that skin exposed, would be enough for the court to consider Mingyu to be up to no good, to be plotting something nefarious. The King isn’t known to be a rational man when it comes to the Crown Prince and decorum.

Mingyu eyes him warily, struggling with the shift in His Highness’s demeanor.

“A bet?” Slowly.

“Yes, a bet. A game wherein I will ask you for something and you will do the same for me, and then a—”

“I know what a bet is, Your Highness. I’m not a fool.”

“Let’s make a bet. Come on, sir, I’ve been so bored lately.”

“What kind of bet?”

“Must you ask questions? Is it not enough to simply agree to appease your prince?”

_My prince?_

“Fine. I agree. What do I get?”

“It’s your choice.” The Prince shrugs one shoulder carelessly, then quirks his lips. “I already know what I’ll demand.”

“What is it you want?”

“Come now. You don’t have to act as though you’re unaware of what I want. You’re much too clever not to know, aren’t you?” Jeonghan asks, not exactly unkind despite the bite to his words. “Don’t be disappointing.”

Mingyu scoffs and looks away, his face scalding once more. That’s all the confirmation Prince Jeonghan needs of just how well Mingyu knows him.

His Highness aims a smug smile at him, one that’s dirty and wholly inappropriate. It’s so far from what’s expected of a prince that Mingyu has the urge to reach over and thwack him upside his head to remind him of his manners, as if he is merely one of the footmen Mingyu has to train and not the future king of a nation.

Mingyu takes a deep breath to steel himself, to put himself back into the boots of the King’s knight, then grabs the Prince around one of his upper arms and begins to haul him away from the danger of the shoreline.

“You’ll want to be hearing what I want in turn, won’t you?” Mingyu tacks on a quick, “Your Highness,” before he forgets.

“It doesn’t matter,” Prince Jeonghan dismisses flippantly, flapping a hand about in front of them as Mingyu drags him into the cover of the trees. “I can buy you anything you want. Coin is no issue. Ask for the stars if you’d like and I’ll give them to you.”

His wish is one you cannot buy.

“All right. What’s the bet about?”

Jeonghan smiles and digs his feet into the dirt to stop them from walking any further.

“Chase me.”

Mingyu blinks, not relenting his grip on the Prince’s arm even as the Prince tries to paw it away. “Like a game of tag?”

“No, not exactly. Let me go and in a short while I want you to track me. If you can find me by nightfall then you win. If you don’t… well, the chambermaids are loyal enough to me that they won’t say a word if they see you.”

Mingyu has to close his eyes.

“You can’t be serious.”

“But I am.” There’s that self-satisfied voice of the Prince’s again. No one thinks better of himself than the Prince.

He levels Jeonghan with a serious look, brow heavy over his eyes.

“Your Highness,” he begins, “if I left you to your own devices for such a long time my knighthood would deserve to be taken away. I couldn’t allow you to be thrust into such a dangerous position.”

The wind picks up once more to shake the trees and float leaves to the forest floor. The Prince reaches toward him and delicately plucks one such leaf from Mingyu’s shoulder, twisting it around by its stem. He gestures at Mingyu with it.

“You know I’ll just escape once more if you don’t play along. You can’t just trap me in the castle like my father.”

Mingyu tenses his jaw and looks away from Jeonghan’s nimble fingers, from the verdant leaf that spins enough to dizzy him.

“Fine. I’ll play along with your inclination towards danger for now. However”—here he pauses and catches Prince Jeonghan’s wrist, stilling the leaf and locking away the throb in his chest at sun-warmed skin under his hand—“the moment the sun sets, I’ll be expecting you to make your way back to the castle. You can go no further away than the capital. You cannot go where there isn’t someone to help you if you are in danger. You must call out for me if you get in trouble. Invoke my name, anyone should know it and know better than to bring harm to a friend of mine. Don’t tell anyone who you are. Are we clear?”

The Crown Prince releases the leaf and brightens his face with one of those smiles again, his eyes catching in the light shining through the canopy and the mischief on his mind.

“So many rules, such a bossy knight,” Jeonghan teases. “Very well. I accept all of your conditions, of course. As obvious as they were.”

Mingyu lets go and begins to shuffle out of his knee-length cape, pulling free from it and moving it over the Prince’s shoulders. He makes quick work with the fastenings, brushing a hand over the hem to be sure that it will cover the rip in His Highness’s breeches. It does. The garment swamps Jeonghan’s frame; a clear indication in the physical difference between a sheltered prince and a trained knight. The material sags in the shoulder area and Mingyu hopes the Prince won’t look too out of place in it.

Mingyu steps back, his breath disrupting the hair curling about the Prince’s neck. Jeonghan watches him cooly, his mouth barely upturned. A thin ghost of a smile, really. Placid and hiding what the Prince must truly be thinking. A mask he’s used to wearing, no doubt.

“Don’t make yourself into a target,” Mingyu says at last, stamping down on the charged moment that just passed between them.

“Of course not.”

“Don’t get hurt.”

The Prince’s eyes roll in his head. He begins to leave, heading north. “I’ll be fine, sir,” he reassures. “I don’t exactly tell you each time I slip through the castle walls, you know. I’ve been alone more times than I can tally.”

Jeonghan’s voice fades as he moves quickly, twigs snapping, the shuffling of feet. And then nothing. Utter silence pouring in around where the Crown Prince once was.

Mingyu blinks, then turns back to face the surf. Face warmed by the blinding light, his eyes fall to the smear of arched footprints the Prince left behind him in the sand. A fleeting thought passes him by—that greedy beast inside him again, tormenting him for sport—telling him to lean down and lay his hand over the golden sand, and at once he banishes it.

He begins to count backwards in his head.


End file.
